Canvas on Amazon Alexa

For the past month or so, I have been developing this Amazon Alexa to interface with Canvas API. The app can retrieve grading, assignment and announcement information from a student perspective. Please see the video below. The amazon echo device is only $40 which is affordable to students. However I think the real potential of this is from school/teacher/administrative and also the observer perspective. Anyone has any ideas on how to make it more useful?

It makes me want to get Alexa Ed Wu, well done. I'm not sure I'm ready for this level of technology but I think what you have done sounds like the most relevant set of actions. Checking announcements, grades, and assignments due is what would be at the top of my mind as a student. For instructors, I think the only change would be in flipping what's due to "is there anything that needs to be graded?". Inbox messages would be the other thing I check frequently in addition to Announcements. i.e. Alexa do I have any inbox messages. But usually I forward my Inbox to e-mail so not as important.

I could see a few instructor use cases related to analytics. For example, if an instructor could ask "Who failed the last assignment graded in IT-101?" or "Which students in IT-101 haven't logged into Canvas in the last [x] days?" Those commands might be difficult because of the need to aggregate data for an answer.

A related set of commands might be related to the 'Message Students Who.." functionality in the gradebook. That way an instructor could say "For Quiz 13 in IT-101, message all students who haven't submitted yet" and then the user could specify the message that goes out to students (e.g. "Just a reminder that the due date is May 30.").

Thank you IDS ID2. Those are really good suggestions. Hopefully I can spend some time this weekend to work on them. I looked into the command you suggested, "Which students in IT-101 haven't logged into Canvas in the last [x] days?" and I was able to implement it. I used recent_students through the API. I think I should indicate how I use the API to develop the commands so that maybe someone can tell me a better way to go about it.

The skill is not published yet. The tricky part is that because the Alexa service is directly integrating with a single school Canvas instance (that also means there is no storing data in between), the school admin will need to provide me with a client id and client secret to setup the skill and that skill will only work for that particular school (OAuth2 - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation ). With that said, if you are interested, I am more than happy to work with your Canvas admin and to publish a skill just for your institution (or any community members who are interested). Publishing a skill doesn't incur any cost to me or you and for the back end processing, I use a service called Amazon Lamda which is literally free to me because Amazon provides me with promotional credit. For my benefit, I just want to see my skill passed the skill certification processes and being published.

I am having problems with my Canvas skill on Alexa device! I For University of Hull, is Canvas skill live now?When I say, "Alexa, open Canvas", DOT (or Alexa) gives me the message "sorry, I'm having trouble accessing your Canvas skill right now" !

I folowed the procedure to enable Canvas on my Alexa devices. (Echo and Dot)I enabled the Canvas skill in the Alexa app , entering my institution's Canvas name and the app directlly showed my Canvas acount email and authorising name to my canvas account.I dissabled the lock skill with a security pin, and I completed account linking, and I received the message that "Canvas has been successfully linked"What can I do to have an working Canvas skill on my device?